The Playboy Philosophy: Sex, Religion & the State

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Introduction

In our continuing consideration of the rights of the individual in a free society, we discussed in the last installment of this editorial series (February) the extent to which a person’s private sexual behavior is the subject of governmental control in America.

This nation was founded on the premise that each one of us is entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; our democratic government was established to protect these rights and our Constitution guarantees them. Yet every state has statutes specifically designed to control the most personal, intimate acts of its citizens.

America is presumably the land of the free and the home of the brave. But our legislators, our judges and our officers of law enforcement are allowed to enter our most private inner sanctuaries—our bedrooms—and dictate the activity that takes place there.

We are free in a voting booth, in a stockholder’s meeting, a union hall, or a house of worship, but we are not free in bed. Our democracy, which prides itself on its permissiveness in almost every area of individual endeavor, has proven intolerably restrictive in matters of sex.

Our society’s repressive and suppressive antisexualism is derived from twisted theological concepts that became firmly imbedded in Christianity during the Dark Ages, several hundred years after the crucifixion of Christ, and spread and became more severe with Calvinist Puritanism after the Reformation. In the Old World, the people suffered under totalitarian church-state controls of both Catholic and Protestant origin and many of the early colonists in America came here in search of the religious freedom denied them in Europe. Our own founding fathers, well aware of the history of religious tyranny in other countries, established with the Constitution of the United States the concept of a separate church and state as the best means of assuring that both our religion and government would remain free, thus guaranteeing the freedom of the people.

Unfortunately, the seeds of religious antisexualism were already planted in the people themselves, however; in addition, through the centuries, a certain amount of ecclesiastical law had found its way into common law of Europe, and then into American law as well. As a result, not even the guarantees of the Constitution itself were enough to keep our religion and government apart.

19th Century Antisexualism

Puritan antisexualism increasingly infected both England and America and reached its climax in the 19th century. We are not suggesting that the period was noted for its purity or sexual abstinence—quite the contrary; as always occurs, the repression merely produced an uncommon amount of perversion and sexual aberration.

We have commented previously on the extent to which Victorian England was obsessed with sex, with an excessive modesty in speech, manners and dress that only accented matters sexual (The Playboy Philosophy—Part X, September 1963). The pre-Christian Celts and Saxons were a virile, vigorous, outgoing people; Britain had paid a heavy price for its religious heritage, for the traditional reserve and lack of spontaneity of the Englishman are as much a result of his Puritan past as is his taste for the sadomasochistic pleasures of the whip (flagellation is such a common accommodation of the English prostitute that revelations on the price paid for such services—one pound per stroke—during the Dr. Stephen Ward–Christine Keeler–Mandy Rice-Davies trial raised hardly an eyebrow among blasé Britishers).

In America the antisexual bent of the 1800s was mixed with excessive sentimentality and romanticism; women were placed upon pedestals, virginity and chastity were prized most highly, and the notion that a “nice girl” might experience anything akin to sexual yearning, or take pleasure in the sex act, was unthinkable. Morton M. Hunt, author of The Natural History of Love, comments in his chapter for Julian Huxley’s The Humanist Frame: “…The 19th century—that high-water mark of romantic and sentimental feeling—was a time when many men were made impotent or masochistic by the prevailing love mores and many women were warped by frigidity and frustration.”

It was also early in the last century that the censor first raised his ugly blue snout in America. Our founding fathers had spoken out most forcefully on the subject: In 1814 Thomas Jefferson stated that he was “mortified” to learn that the sale of a book should ever become a subject of inquiry in these United States. “Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what books may be sold and what we may buy?” Jefferson demanded. “Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be cut or stretched?”

“For the first hundred years,” reports Morris L. Ernst in The Best Is Yet, “the United States was unafraid of sex. It was free of literary taboos, except for a remnant of blasphemy…. These men who drafted our federal Constitution and signed our Declaration of Independence bulged their cheeks with naughty giggles when reading the works of Fielding and Smollet. The plays of Congreve were presented without expurgation. And there was no substantial demand in this land for the importation of a Master of Revels who, since the days of Fielding’s attack on Walpole, had been using his shears on the drama of Great Britain….”

But in the beginning of the 19th century we have what is generally accepted as the first recorded suppression of a literary work in the U.S. on the grounds of obscenity. The book was John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, better known by the name of its heroine, Fanny Hill. Cleland’s delightful classic of ribaldry had been around for more than half a century and no one had thought to censor; Ben Franklin is reputed to have had a copy in his library. But the book was suppressed in the early 1800s, and it did not appear again in legal publication in this country for a century and a half until, in 1963, G.P. Putnam’s Sons—emboldened by the recent victories over censorship in the courts—brought forth a new addition. Fanny’s reappearance resulted in several obscenity suits which the publisher successfully defended; in the most significant, late in the year, a New York court first held the book to be obscene, then—in as refreshing a bit of jurisprudence as we have witnessed in the Empire State in a very long while—reversed itself, without the need for appeal to a higher court.

After the unhappy fate of Fanny at the start of the previous century, the censors went back—for a time—to whatever censors do when they’re not censoring; in a memorable debate in the U.S. Senate in 1835, Clay, Calhoun and Webster declared that the federal government should never have anything to do with censorship: and in that same year a visitor from France. Alexis de Tocqueville, reported: “Attempts have been made by some governments to protect the morality of nations by prohibiting licentious books. In the United States no one is punished for this sort of work.”

Yet in 1842 Congress passed a Tariff Act that forbade the importation of “obscene books or pictures into the United States”; and in 1865 another law passed prohibiting the transmission of objectionable materials through the mail. “But there was one saving grace in these laws,” wrote Ernest Sutherland Bates. “It never occurred to anyone apparently that they should be enforced.

"And then around 1870 the lid was clamped down. Censorship was spread over the land like a prairie fire.” It was imported, like the Puritans themselves, from England. As Andrew Lang expressed it; “English literature had been at least free-spoken as any other to the death of Smollett. Then in 20 years, at most, English literature became…the most respectful of the young person’s blush that the world had ever known.”

The growing sexual repression of a century erupted in an orgy of censorship—led by the infamous Anthony Comstock and others of his ilk—continuing to the end of the 1800s and into the beginning of a new century.

Comstock toiled for a number of years as an unpaid postal inspector, ferreting out the indecent, the lewd, the lascivious and the obscene in the U.S. mails in what was clearly a labor of love, before graduating to the post of secretary of, and primary spokesman for, the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. He was responsible for the passage of the Comstock Act, upon which H.L. Mencken reported bitterly: “The story of the passage of the Act of Congress of March 3, 1873, is a classical tale of Puritan impudence and chicanery. Ostensibly…the new laws were designed to put down traffic [in obscenity] which, of course, found no defenders—but Comstock had so drawn them that their actual sweep was vastly wider, and once he was firmly in the saddle, his enterprises scarcely knew limits. Having disposed of The Confessions of Maria Monk and Night Life in Paris, he turned to Rabelais and the Decameron, and having driven these agents under the book counters, he pounced upon Zola, Balzac and Daudet, and having disposed of these, too, he began a pogrom which, in other hands, eventually brought down such astounding victims as Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure.

"In carrying on this war of extermination upon all ideas that violated their private notions of virtue and decorum, Comstock and his followers were very greatly aided by the vagueness of the law. It prohibited the use of the mails for transporting all matter of ‘obscene, lewd, lascivious…or filthy’ character, but conveniently failed to define these adjectives. As a result…it was possible to bring an accusation against practically any publication that aroused the Comstockian blood-lust.”

Heywood Broun remarked, “Anthony Comstock may have been entirely correct in his assumption that the division of living creatures into male and female was a vulgar mistake, but a conspiracy of silence about the matter will hardly alter the facts.”

Not until the Twenties was there any noticeable tendency toward a thaw in this chilling climate of censorship, and it was not until the most recent years that American maturity and the U.S. courts reached the point where we can once again contemplate the possibility of the free press assured us by our founding fathers.

Contemporary Antisexualism

Our fear of sex has been sufficient, as we have illustrated in considerable detail in early installments of the Philosophy, to rationalize the abridgement of our Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of both speech and press. Sex has also served as a justification for curtailing academic freedom—and the mere expression of an unpopular opinion on the subject can still cause the dismissal of a college professor (as it did at the University of Illinois in 1960); or a too realistic, though award-laden, drama by Eugene O'Neill may bring down the wrath of a university president and prompt the registration of the head and staff of an entire drama department (as occurred at Baylor in 1963).

Discussing, describing or graphically depicting sex too explicitly, or with an improper moral point of view, is still prohibited throughout much of these supposedly free United States. Why? Because it may lead to like behavior. And that it is the greatest fear of all: that sex may be indulged in freely, without the burden of guilt and shame placed upon it by our ignorant, superstitious, fear-ridden ancestors in the Middle Ages.

Never mind that the contemporary psychiatrist knows, and will gladly tell any who care to listen, that books, and pictures, and pamphlets and papers that deal openly and honestly with sex have little or no effect upon human behavior and whatever effect they do have is healthful, rather than injurious, to society; never mind that the science of psychiatry has revealed that it is the repression of the natural sex instinct, and the association of sex with guilt and shame, that cause the hurt to humankind—producing frigidity, impotence, masochism, sadism, homosexuality and all manner of sexual perversions, social and psychological ills, neuroses and psychoses; never mind that all of history documents the utter impossibility of curbing the normal sex drive, of keeping the male and female free from this sin on the flesh; never mind that modern research into sex behavior has revealed that America’s own Puritan attempts at sexual suppression have failed to halt or seriously hinder the “immoral” sex conduct on the majority of our adult population and resulted in nought but frustration, aberration, agony and heartache; never mind that any effort to regulate or control the private sexual morality of the adult citizens of the United States is contrary to the principle of individual freedom that is the very foundation of our democracy, and is in conflict with the most basic guarantees of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Never mind—for such arguments are based upon reason. And there is nothing reasoned or rational about our society’s attitude toward sex. It is based, instead, upon irrational conglomeration of prejudice, superstition, fear, faith, mysticism and marlarkey.

Sex, Religion and the State

The contemporary Judaeo-Christian concept of sexual morality stems—as we have indicated in some detail in the previous issues (The Playboy Philosophy, August and September, 1963)—less from original Judaic law or the teaching of Christ than from the extreme antisexualism of the medieval Church, which viewed all sex, both in and out of marriage, and even marriage itself, with extreme distaste; and Calvinist Puritanism, which extended the antagonism toward sexual pleasure to include all pleasure in general.

Both the medieval Church and Calvin’s Puritanism ruled their respective European societies with an iron hand, through the ecclesiastical courts and control over the secular governments as well; both demanded obedience of church law—both tortured, imprisoned and executed heretics.

The Church of the Middle Ages established penitential laws regulating every aspect of sexual life, including not only fornication and adultery, but masturbation and even involuntary nocturnal emissions; the Church also decreed the days of the week and the weeks of the year in which it was permissible for the market to indulge in coitus, as well as delineating the sexual techniques to be used between man and wife in order to remain free from sin; the sexual act was permissible within marriage only and for the single purpose of begetting children—the pleasures of sex were supposed to be kept to a minimum by the pious and it was the pleasure attendant with the act, even more than the act itself, that was thought to be sinful; women were held in extremely low esteem and a number of religious leaders of the period denounced them as the principle source of sin and the cause of mark fell from the grace of God (it was in this time that the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden was given its sexual interpretation, with Eve cast in the role of the temptress—although Christian authorities of every denomination agree that the “Original Sin” was pride, and there is no evidence in either the Bible or in any respected theological interpretation of the Scriptures to justify the idea, still held by many, that the sin was sexual).

John Calvin and his Puritan followers accepted sex within marriage as essentially good and opposed the celibacy of the priesthood, but Calvin warned against any “indelicacy” in sexual relations and exhorted the married to “restrain themselves from all immodest lasciviousness and impropriety.”

He considered it an “inexcusable effrontery” for a wife to touch that part of her husband’s body “from the sight and touch of which all chaste women naturally recoil.” Puritanism was an essentially joyless religion—in sex and in all other aspects of daily life. And sex outside the bonds of marriage was damned as the worst of all possible sins. William Graham Cole, Ph.D. and noted member of the ministry of the Presbyterian Church, previously assistant professor of religion of Smith College and presently President of Lake Forest (Illinois) College, states in his book, Sex in Christianity and Psychoanalysis, “Calvin…could not believe that God would under any circumstances fail to vent His anger against fornication, and he extended the sense of the Seventh Commandment to cover that as well as the other forms of sexual vice….

"Sodomy Calvin regarded as a particularly heinous crime, since not even the beasts, he said [quite incorrectly], are guilty of such a perversion of nature. Calvin had clearly no experience with the sexual behavior of animals. Bestiality, sexual relations with a member of another species, is another sin repugnant to the modesty of nature itself, and the law very properly [in Calvin’s view] prescribes the death penalty….” Dr. Cole states that Calvin also “spoke with approval of the severe punishment meted out by Hebrew Law [for] sexual intercourse during menstruation.

The person was punished by exile, and Calvin felt the punishment fit the crime, for he regarded any guilty of this as downright degenerate….” In Geneva, Calvin attempted, unsuccessfully, to impose the death penalty for adultery, but later, in England, under Puritan rule, adultery was made a capital offense punishable by hanging, and some citizens actually were hung for the crime.

It is not our intention to dwell upon the irrational aspects of such religious doctrine; in a free society, each religion should be free to teach whatever it pleases, rational or not, and each individual free to either accept or reject the belief. What concerns us here is the extent to which this antisexualism has been projected into secular society and has even found its way into the laws that govern our land.

In the last installment of this editorial series we examined the extent to which religious beliefs on sex are reflected in our laws governing marriage and divorce. Marriage, in our society, is a church-state license to engage in sex and almost all sexual activity outside of marriage is prohibited by statutes on fornication, adultery and cohabitation in most of the 50 states.

We oppose these laws—not as an endorsement of either premarital or extramarital sex—but in the firm belief that such personal conduct should be left to the private determination of the individual and is not rightly the business of government in our democracy. This belief is shared by a great many legal and religious leaders in America, who have been among the most outspoken in the current criticism of our archaic sex statutes.

The legal view was expressed by the American Law Institute, when it authorized a Model Penal Code for sex in 1955 recommending that all consensual relations between adults in private should be excluded from the criminal law, since “no harm to the secular interests of the community is involved in atypical sex practice in private between consenting adult partners and there is a fundamental question of the protection to which every individual is entitled against state interference in his personal affairs when he is not hurting others.”

The religious view is expressed by Father James Jones of the Episcopal Church, who has observed that when personal sexual behavior is governed by the state, it is less likely to effectively change the behavior than to make it hidden or secretive, thereby making more difficult the task of religion in dealing with the moral issues involved.

The religious view is confirmed by the facts: Although 37 of the 50 states have laws against fornication and 45 have statutes prohibiting adultery, Dr. Alfred Kinsey and associates, in their monumental study of U.S. sex behavior, published in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, found that the majority of adult men and women in America admitted to having sexual intercourse outside of marriage. Kinsey’s studies established that the sexual experience of adult Americans varies widely—depending upon social and educational background, with 67 percent of the males with some college education, 84 percent of those who attended high school but did not go on to college, and 98 percent of men with only a grade-school education, having engaged in premarital sexual intercourse; approximately 50 percent of all females have coitus prior to marriage and, unlike the statistics for males, this figure increases for women of higher education, with some 60 percent of the females with a college education having had intercourse before marriage.

Although both the social taboos and the statutes are far stricter regarding adultery. Kinsey estimates—taking into account the high degree of cover-up he found among men in this portion of his study—approximately 50 percent of all married males have sexual intercourse with women other than their wives at some time during their marriage. In Kinsey’s study of U.S. females, 26 percent of all married women admitted having engaged in extramarital intercourse; the females with a higher educational background showed a slightly higher incidence, with 29 percent of the wives with some college education admitting to extramarital sex. Here again, as with the married males, Kinsey found a considerable hesitancy on the part of the wives to divulge the facts related to marital infidelity—a problem not experienced by the researchers in those portions of the survey dealing with premarital sex, suggesting that the true percentages for extramarital sex among women are somewhat higher.

Using only the minimal estimates supplied by Kinsey and his staff, however, it is safe to say that one out of every two U.S. husbands, and something more than one out of every four wives, will engage in extramarital intercourse at some time during their marriages; in addition, nearly all of the males and one half of the females have premarital intercourse. Quite obviously the U.S. laws prohibiting fornication and adultery are having little effect upon the behavior of a sizable portion of our society.

Crimes Against Nature

It is in our laws against sodomy, or what some states refer to as “the abominable and detestable crime against nature,” that our religiously generated aversion to sex proves most pronounced. Sodomy historically and medically refers to anal intercourse, or buggery, but the statutes on sodomy include all manner of sexual activity conceived by someone, somewhere, at one time or another, to be “unnatural”; and this means, of course, in this sexually repressed society, almost every variety of sexual activity other than “natural” coitus. Sodomy laws thus cover, in one state or another, not only buggery, but fellatio (oral-genital contact with the male), cunnilingus (oral-genital contact with the female), homosexual behavior, bestiality (sex contact with animals), necrophilia (sexual contact with the dead), and in two states, even mutual masturbation. The very concept of “natural” and “unnatural” sex is, of course, a religious-moral one. Among all of these “crimes against nature”, only necrophilia is relatively rare and a certain symptom of a serious psychosexual disorder. We will offer no personal moral judgments on the rest of this behavior now—reserving the expression of our own concept of a rational sexual morality for a later installment of this editorial series—but the psychiatrist, without making any moral determination on the subject would consider almost all of this activity normal (and, therefore, “natural”); and Kinsey found a far greater frequency for most of it than was previously assumed.

Forty-nine of the fifty states and the District of Columbia have sodomy statutes and they include some of the most emotion-tinged language to be found anywhere in the law. The Michigan statute, which states, “Any person who shall commit the abominable and detestable crime against nature, either with mankind or with any animal, shall be guilty of a felony,” is typical; the phrase “abominable and detestable crime against nature” appears with such regularity in the sodomy statutes that it has the effect of being an alternate title for the offense, and Rhode Island actually lists the crime under that heading; in Utah, Arizona and Nevada, it is also referred to as the “infamous crime against nature.”

The “abominable and detestable” phrase also becomes, in some instances, the sole description of the offenses prohibited under the law. Some of the legislators responsible for initiating and passing the statutes were apparently so embarrassed by the whole business that they offered no further clue to the nature of the crime, except to state that it was illegal if perpetrated “with mankind or animal.”

The noted 18th century jurist Sir William Blackstone author of Commentaries, which are still fundamental in any study of English or U.S. law, reflects the irrational emotionalism associated with these statutes when he writes: “I will not act so disagreeable a part, to my readers as well as to myself, is to dwell any longer upon a subject, the very mention of which is a disgrace to human nature. It will be more eligible to imitate in this respect the delicacy of our English law which treats it, in its very indictments, as a crime not fit to be named…. Which leads us to add a word concerning it punishment. This the voice of nature and of reason, and the express law of God determined to be capital, of which we have a signal instance, long before the Jewish dispensation, by the destruction of two cities by fire from Heaven; so that this is a universal, not merely a provincial precept; and our ancient law in some degree imitated this punishment, by commanding such miscreants to be burned to death; though Fleta says they should be buried alive; either of which punishments was indifferently used for this crime against the ancient Goths. But now the general punishment of all felonies is the same, namely, by hanging; and this offense (being in time of popery only subject to ecclesiastical censures) was made a felony without benefit of clergy….”

The U.S. courts have displayed a similar distaste in dealing with the subject. Thus the judge, in State vs. Whitmarsh, commented, “We regret that the importance of this question [whether or not oral-genital contact should be considered a crime against nature] renders it necessary to soil the pages of our reports with a discussion of a subject so loathsome and disgusting as the one confronting us.”

Former Judge Morris Ploscowe, of the New York Magistrate’s Court, now Adjunct Associate Professor of Law at New York University, states in Sex and the Law: “Ever since Lord Coke’s time, the attitude of judges has been that sodomy is ‘a detestable and abominable sin among Christians not to be named.’ The result of this attitude is a sharp departure from the usual rules of criminal pleading. It is one of the basic canons of criminal procedure that a defendant is entitled to know the particulars of a crime charged against him, so that he can adequately prepare his defense. If the indictment is not sufficiently specific, the defendant has a right to demand a bill of particulars. But when a man is charged with sodomy or a crime against nature, a indictment in the language of the statute is enough. It is enough that the indictment alleges that a particular time and place the defendant committed a ‘crime against nature’ with a specific person. The defendant need not be informed of the particular sexual perversion which is charged against him. As the Court put in the case of Honselman vs. People:

”‘It was never the practice to describe the particular manner of the details of the commission of the crime, but the offense was treated in the indictment as the abominable crime not fit to be named among Christians. The existence of such an offense is a disgrace to human nature. The legislature has not seen fit to define it further than by the general term, and the records of the courts need not to be defiled with the details of different acts which may go to constitute it. A statement of the offense in the language of the statute is all that is required.’“

Heterosexual Sodomy

Although English common law, from which our own statutes on the subject are derived, defined and prohibited only buggery with mankind or beast as "the crime against nature,” carrying the penalty of death, a majority of the present-day U.S. statutes include both oral and anal intercourse under sodomy.

Moreover, none of the statutes in any of the 49 states make any distinction between heterosexual and homosexual sodomy—both are prohibited under the law; and what is even less clearly recognized is that none of the U.S. statutes make any distinction between the married and the unmarried. Our government thus specifies, quite literally, where a husband and wife may, or may not, kiss one another; and the manner in which the sex act may be initiated and carried out in the marriage bed without becoming illegal.

Modern insights into human behavior have radically changed society’s views on the subject of perversion, of course, and what was considered “unnatural” in sex is now recognized as perfectly normal, and in many instances, desirable. A majority of our contemporary marriage manuals, courses in sex education, and counselors on the problems of sex and family, stress a natural freedom in the love play that accompanies marital coitus; both husband and wife are informed that the intimate preliminaries of sex can be important in achieving the full satisfaction of both partners; every part of the loved one should be dear, and free from shame, and the sexual foreplay may quite properly include kisses and caresses wherever desired; no act of intimacy that brings pleasure to members of the mating should be considered improper or taboo.

This quote from Sexual Harmony in Marriage by Oliver M. Butterfield, Ph.D., a book reportedly given by some members of the Presbyterian clergy to young couples about to be married, is typical: “Any position is proper which permits full satisfaction for both parties. All parts of the body are proper for use if they can be made to contribute to the general goal without giving offense to the taste or feelings of either partner, and if either partner is harmed thereby.”

Dr. Albert Ellis states, in an article published in Marriage and Family Living: “The only sexual ‘perversion’ is a fetish or rigidity which convinces an individual that he or she can only have satisfactory sex relations in one method or position. The great majority of sexual perverts in this country are not sadists, homosexuals, exhibitionists, or similar deviates, but ‘normal’ married individuals who only enjoy one method of coitus…because they are afraid or ashamed to try the dozens of other sexual variations that are easily available to them.”

In offering such psychologically sound advice, the marriage manuals, educators and counselors of America are actually inviting husbands and wives to commit criminal acts in their bedrooms—acts that are prohibited by law almost everywhere in the United States, with lengthy prison sentences prescribed to the guilty.

Since the relations between a man and his wife are most often kept private, relatively few instances of such behavior come to public attention. Kinsey reports, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, however, “While the laws are more commonly enforced in regard to such relations outside of marriage, there are instances of spouses whose oral activities became known to their children, and through them to the neighborhood, and ultimately led to prosecution and penal sentences for both husband and wife….”

More often this behavior comes to light as the result of a divorce action, although Ploscowe comments that it has been customary for the courts to view such charges with skepticism when they are a part of a suit for divorce, since they are inherently unprovable and rest solely upon the assertion of the party seeking to end the marriage. Sometimes the behavior comes to light through charges lodged by an unwilling partner in oral or anal sex, because the act was allegedly performed under duress.

Kinsey states in his second volume, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, “We have cases of persons who were convicted because one of the spouses objected, or because some other person became aware that oral and anal play had been included in the marital activities.” Kinsey observes that there have been relatively few actual convictions of husbands or wives under U.S. sodomy laws, but adds, “As long as they remain on the books, they are subject to capricious enforcement and become tools for blackmailers. In those states where the definition of cruelty as one of the grounds for divorce includes ‘personal indignities’ or ‘mental cruelty,’ divorce cases involving either the husband’s or the wife’s desires or demands for the use of oral techniques are not infrequent.”

For the unmarried, the chances of discovery and possible prosecution are obviously greater. Completion of the act to orgasm, with either the male or female, is not required to be guilty of the offense—the act itself is sufficient; in some states, a conviction may be based upon circumstantial evidence, or simply upon an attempt to commit the act: Alabama’s statute on the “crime against nature” states, “An offense may be proven under this section…by circumstantial evidence, when positive proof is wanting…. A conviction may be had for an attempt to commit an offense denounced by this section.” In some states the mere suggestion of solicitation to engage in such behavior is a crime. Kinsey reports, “One case even goes so far as to uphold the conviction of a man for soliciting his wife to commit sodomy.”

Considering the obvious abhorrence with which both the legislative and the judicial branches of our government have dealt with the subject, and the prohibitive penalties prescribed for the assorted nonprocreative acts collected together under the sodomy and “crime-against-nature” statutes (the most severe of any of our laws dealing with sexual activity between consenting adults), it is especially interesting—and significant—to consider how prevalent at least some of this behavior is in our society.

Dr. Kinsey and his researchers found relatively little evidence of heterosexual anal intercourse, either within or outside of marriage, and neither of their first books include any statistics on this behavior. Kinsey did find marked differences in the anal eroticism reported by his subjects, however, and some of the females described sexual responses to anal intercourse that were closely akin to those achieved through vaginal coitus. More current research prompts the Sex Institute to estimate that approximately four percent of the adult male population has attempted, and three percent successfully accomplished, anal heterosexual intercourse; these statistics are a preliminary study, however, and no educational breakdown is presently available; consistent with Kinsey’s previous findings, it is to be assumed that the percentage among upper-level, college-educated males will be somewhat higher than this overall average. A number of experts in sexual behavior, including Dr. Lawrence Z. Freedman, of the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Chicago, consider these percentages to be low; Dr. Freedman states, “My impression is that both female homosexual experience and male anality are probably underestimated in these [Kinsey’s and his Sex Institute’s] figures.”

In contrast to anal intercourse, however, Kinsey found oral-genital sex—also a considered a “crime against nature” in most states—quite common among males and females, married and unmarried.

Kinsey reports, “Mouth-genital contacts of some sort, with the subject as either the active or the passive member in the relationship, occur at some time in the histories of nearly 60 percent of all males”; in an Accumulative Incidence table for Oral Contacts in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, by which is meant the sexual experience of the subject up to the time of the interview, Kinsey found that 18.4 percent of the male had premarital heterosexual oral-genital relations of an “active” nature (cunnilingus, performed by the male on the female) and 38.6 percent had “passive” mouth-genital relations prior to marriage (fellatio, performed on the male by the female); however, the American husband apparently believes it is better to give than to receive, or is less sexually repressed than his spouse, as approximately 45.3 percent of the married males engage in cunnilingus with their wives, while 42.7 percent experience fellatio.

As with most sexual activity, educational background plays an important role in determining the extent of oral-genital activity that accompanies the sex act, with cunnilingus and fellatio far more common among upper-educated males than among their less-educated brothers. Among those males who have never gone beyond eighth grade in school, the accumulative incidence for mouth-genital contacts of any kind is 40 percent; for those males with an education limited to high school, the incidence is 65 percent; and for those with some college, the percentages rise to 72.

Fifteen percent of all U.S. females have some mouth-genital contact prior to marriage and, as might be expected, Kinsey found a high correlation between such activity prior to marriage and the extent of premarital intercourse engaged in by his female subjects: Among the younger women in the study who had not engaged in premarital coitus, “only three percent had allowed the male to touch their genitalia orally…. But among those females who had had some, even though not extensive coital experience, 46 percent had accepted such contacts….”

Oral stimulation of the male by the female follows the same general pattern, though the incidence is slightly lower. On this Kinsey comments, “Often the female makes such contacts only because she is urged to do so by the male, but there are a few females who initiate such activity and some who may be much aroused by it. A few may even reach orgasm as they stimulate the male orally. This greater inclination of the human male toward oral activity is duplicated among other species of mammals. Contrary to our earlier thinking, we now understand that there are basic psychologic differences between the sexes; and although cultural traditions may also be involved, the differences in oral behavior may depend primarily on the greater capacity of the male to be stimulated psychologically.”

Among married women, approximately 50 percent have some mouth-genital contact, either active or passive, with their husbands; Kinsey’s report on the Female does not include any classification by educational background, but it is to be assumed that the pattern already established would hold true and that females with a higher education would also display a markedly higher incidence of both premarital and marital activity of an oral-genital nature.

One of Kinsey’s most interesting findings related to oral eroticism has to do with the date of birth of his subjects—a comparison of the incidence of this activity among both the males and females of the present and previous generations. Quite clearly the public attitude toward such behavior has changed radically during the past 50 years and what was once considered “perversion” is now recognized and accepted throughout much of our society as both natural and good; such a lessening of the taboos connected with this sexual activity might be expected to produce a noticeable increase in the activity itself.

In addition, the antisexual might argue that the prevalence of such “sophisticated” nonreproductive variations on the sexual theme offers evidence of a sexually jaded society that requires such “abnormal” psychosexual stimulation, because the unnatural contemporary obsession with the subject has dulled our capacity to appreciate sex and be aroused by it in its simpler forms.

It is significant to note, therefore, that in the accumulative-incidence tables in both the Male and Female studies, the oral-genital activity is relatively the same for the past and present generations. Society’s publicly proclaimed attitude on the subject has undergone a dramatic change, but the actual private behavior of the individual has remained almost constant. There were, as we have pointed out, significant variations based upon educational background, but for both male and females of similar education in this and the previous generations, born in each decade back to 1900, Kinsey comments, “There were surprisingly few differences….”

This fact is important, we feel, both in establishing the essential naturalness of the behavior itself and in pointing out how relatively ineffective social and legal taboos are in suppressing natural sexuality.

Homosexual Sodomy

The same oral and anal techniques may be used to introduce variety and additional pleasure into a heterosexual relationship are the primary means of sexual gratification in homosexual associations.

As we have already stated, none of the U.S. statutes dealing with sodomy and/or “the abominable and detestable crime against nature” make any distinction between the heterosexual or homosexual practice of such activities. In the enforcement of laws, however, a disproportionately high percent of sodomy arrests and convictions involve homosexual contacts—presumably because a heterosexual cop and a heterosexual judge find a homosexual crime against nature a good deal more “abominable and detestable” than a heterosexual one.

We confess to a strong personal prejudice in favor of the boy-girl variety of sex, but our belief in a free, rational and humane society demands a tolerance of those whose sexual inclinations are different from our own—so long as their activity is limited to consenting adults in private and does not involve either minors or the use of any kind of coercion. Lenny Bruce expressed our viewpoint with typical satiric bite and insight when he said: “I’m not prejudiced against homosexuals, but I wouldn’t want my brother to marry one.”

Actually, we Americans are—as a nation—more intolerant of homosexuality than almost any other country in the world; Dr. Alfred Kinsey states, in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female: “There appears to be no other major culture in the world in which public opinion and the statute law so severely penalize homosexual relationships as they do in the United States today.” You can call an American male a scoundrel and a thief with less chance of eliciting an emotional response than if you simply question his manhood.

The American male’s concern over his masculinity amounts to an obsession. And as we have observed on our consideration of the history of antisex in our culture, such an obsession usually represents a repressed fear. We will explore a bit later, in some detail, the degree to which this fear for our manhood is justified in contemporary U.S. society: We will attempt to trace the trends in our society that are responsible for this drift toward the asexual; and we will point out the extent to which the censor and the prude concentrate their most vigorous attacks on the heterosexual aspects of our culture, leaving the asexual, homosexual, sadomasochistic and fetishtic to flourish.

Quite obviously, however, any attempts society may make to legislate homosexuality out of existence are doomed to certain failure and are actually more inclined to perpetuate and encourage sexual deviation than diminish it.

To whatever extent homosexuality—an erotic attraction to members of the same sex rather than the opposite sex—represents an emotional disorder, it must be dealt with psychiatrically; you do not successfully treat a neurosis by passing a law against its symptoms. In addition, homosexual behavior is not necessarily symptomatic of any emotional aberration; far too great a percentage of our adult population have engaged in some form of homosexual activity at some time in their lives to permit it to be scientifically defined as abnormal.

Kinsey points out that homosexual contacts occur frequently in all other species of animal life and except for the strong cultural taboos affixed to such behavior, the incidence would presumably be equally high among human beings. Kinsey states that a perfectly normal man or woman may be erotically attracted to, or aroused by, a member of the same sex; and prolonged separation from the opposite sex (as in prison or some assignments in the armed services) may significantly increase these homosexual responses. Judge Morris Ploscowe states, in Sex and the Law: “Whenever men are isolated from women, or women from men, from any length of time, homosexual relationships and activity inevitably develop.”

The individual whose homosexual activity becomes known is apt to find himself an outcast in much of our heterosexual society and he is forced into a nether world inhabited almost exclusively by homosexuals; it thus becomes increasingly unlikely that he will find his way back to a predominantly heterosexual life. In this way, we unwittingly support a system calculated to maximize the spread of homosexuality rather than reduce its incidence, at the same time linking the behavior with feelings of guilt and shame conducive to emotional conflict, anxiety and perhaps serious psychological disorientation.

Kinsey makes this further appeal to reason regarding our attitude on the subject: “Condemnations of homosexual as well as some other types of sexual activity are based on the argument that they do not serve the prime function of sex, which is interpreted to be procreation, and in that sense represent a perversion of what is taken to be ‘normal’ sexual behavior. It is contended that the general spread of homosexuality would threaten the existence of the human species, and that the integrity of the home and of the social organization could not be maintained if homosexual activity were not condemned by moral codes and public opinion and made punishable under the statute law. The argument ignores the fact that the existent mammalian species have managed to survive in spite of their widespread homosexual activity, and that sexual relations between males seem to be widespread in certain cultures (for instance, Moslem and Buddhist cultures) which are more seriously concerned with problems of overpopulation than they are with any threat of underpopulation. Interestingly enough, these are also cultures in which the institution of the family is very strong.”

The general condemnation of homosexual relationships originated in Jewish history in about the Seventh century B.C., as a part of the extensive antisexualism that permeated Judaism after the Babylonian exile. Kinsey comments, “Both mouth-genital contacts and homosexual activities had previously been associated with the Jewish religious service, as they had been with the religious services of most of the other peoples of that part of Asia, and just as they have been in other cultures elsewhere in the world. In the wave of nationalism which was then developing among the Jewish people, there was an attempt to disidentify themselves with their neighbors by breaking with many of the customs which they had previously shared with them. Many of the Talmudic condemnations were based on the fact that such activities represented the way of the Canaanite, the way of Chaldean, the way of the pagan, and they were originally condemned as a form of idolatry rather than a sexual crime. Throughout the Middle Ages homosexuality was associated with heresy. The reform in the custom (the mores) soon, however, became a matter of morals, and finally a question for action under criminal law.

"Jewish sex codes were brought over into Christian codes by the early adherents of the Church, including St. Paul, who had been raised in the Jewish tradition on matters of sex. The Catholic sex code is an almost precise continuation of the more ancient Jewish code. For centuries in medieval Europe, the ecclesiastical law dominated on all questions of morals and subsequently became the basis for the English common law, the statute laws of England, and the laws of the various states of the United States. This accounts for the considerable conformity between the Talmudic and Catholic codes and the present-day statute law on sex, including the laws on homosexual activity.”

We share a common Judaeo-Christian heritage with Europe, but American Puritanism has carried this country well beyond the antisexualism still to be found in the Old World. In much of the U.S., the legal penalties for sodomy are surpassed only by those for kidnapping, murder, and rape.

And yet, despite the severest sort of social and statutory prohibitions, Dr. Kinsey and his research associates of Indiana University found a remarkably high percentage of both American men and women who admitted to have had some homosexual contacts. On the opening page of the chapter titled “Homosexual Outlet,” in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Kinsey states: “A considerable portion of the population, perhaps the major portion of the male population, has at least some homosexual experience between adolescence and old age. In addition, about 60 percent of the preadolescent boys engage in homosexual activities, and there is an additional group of adult males who avoid overt contacts but who are quite aware of their potentialities for reacting to other males.”

The data in this study indicate that a minimum of 37 percent of the total male population have had
overt homosexual experience to the point of orgasm after puberty and prior to the age of 45. Among the
males, approximately 30 percent have been brought to climax at least once through mouth-genital contact
with other males; and 14 percent have brought other males to climax in the same manner.

When the sampling is limited to those men who remain single until the age of 35, half (50 percent)
have had overt homosexual contact resulting in orgasm since puberty; when educational level is taken
into consideration for this same group of single males, 58 percent of those who went to high school but
not beyond, 50 percent of grade-school level, and 47 percent of the college level have had homosexual
experience to the point of orgasm after the onset of adolescence.

Specific statistics on anal intercourse in homosexual experiences are not available, although
Kinsey does indicate that anal intercourse is reported by 17 percent of the preadolescent boy who had
engaged in homosexual activity of any sort. In general Kinsey tends to minimize anal eroticism in
homosexual relationships, just as he has in heterosexual ones, and it does appear that oral-genital
techniques are far more common in both.

The erotic techniques initially utilized by females in homosexual relations may often include a little
more than “simple lip kissing and generalized body contacts.” Ultimately, however, with females of
increased homosexual experience, a more intimate fondling of the partner, with manual manipulation of
the breasts and genitalia becomes almost universal (95 to 98 percent); and more specific oral stimulation
of the breasts (in 85 percent) and genitalia (in 78 percent) becomes a common technique.

The male and female differ markedly in the number of homosexual partners with whom they are
typically involved: In Kinsey’s sample of single women, a high proportion (51 percent) of those with any
homosexual experience had had their relations with but a single partner, up to the time at which they
contributed their histories to the study; another 20 percent had had relations with two partners; only 29
percent had had homosexual relations with three or more partners; and only 3 percent had had between
ten and 20. In contrast, a high proportion of the males with homosexual experience had had relations with
several different partners; 22 percent had had more than ten partners, including 8 percent with over 100.
Kinsey originally believed that these differences in promiscuity were due primarily to environmental
considerations, but by the time he was ready to publish his second volume his research had led him to
the conclusion that the differences in male and female promiscuity – whether homosexual or
heterosexual – are primarily the product of varying degrees of psychosexual responsiveness in the two
sexes.

For any oldsters who may find these statistics shocking evidence of the immorality of the modern
generation, it must be reported that – as with the data on similar heterosexual nonreproductive
techniques – males and females born before 1900 (and in each decade since) evidence almost identical
percentages for homosexual activity. Grandma and grandpa would have been shocked beyond words by
any open discussion of the subject, but their actual sexual behavior was little different from our own
today.

Quite obviously, Kinsey’s statistics do not represent the number of “homosexuals” in society, as
we usually understand and use the term, but the amount of “homosexual experience.” The great majority
of the men and women who have had such experiences are primarily heterosexual in their behavior and
the most significant point to be understood from this data is that almost all us have, within ourselves, the
capacity to respond to both heterosexual and homosexual stimuli.

On this point, Kinsey states, “It would encourage clearer thinking on these matters if persons
were not characterized as heterosexual or homosexual, but as individuals who have had certain amounts
of heterosexual experience and certain amounts of homosexual experience. Instead of using these terms
as substantives which stand for persons, or even as adjectives to describe persons, they may be better
used to describe the nature of the overt sexual relations, or of the stimuli to which an individual erotically
responds.”

This point is best illustrated by the following facts: While 37 percent of the total male population –
or nearly two males out of every five – have at least some overt homosexual experience to the point of
orgasm between adolescence and old age, only 25 percent of the male population have had more than
incidental homosexual experience or reactions over at least a three-year period between the ages of 16
and 55; only 18 percent have at least as much homosexual as heterosexual experience in their histories
for at least a three-year period between the same ages; 10 percent are more or less exclusively
homosexual for at least a three-year period; 8 percent are exclusively homosexual for three years; and
only 4 percent are exclusively homosexual throughout their lives.

But related to the subject presently under discussion, we remember that it is not being
“homosexual” that is illegal in almost all of the 50 states, it is the single “homosexual experience” – of the
sort engaged in, at one time or another, by nearly two out of every five adult males in society – that is a
crime. In most states, it is a crime punishable by a lengthy prison sentence.

Our moral and legal condemnations of homosexual activity do not apply equally to both men and
women, being uncommon severe in dealing with male homosexuality and generally ignoring like behavior
in the female. This is consistent with our religious tradition, which was historically placed much emphasis
on male homosexual activity and had little to say about female homosexuality. The ancient Hittite code
condemned men for homosexual behavior, but only under certain specified circumstances, and made no
mention of women; similarly, the references to homosexuality in the Bible and Talmud apply primarily to
the male.

This seeming inconsistency is probably partially explained by the fact that women were
considered socially less important in earlier cultures and their private activities were more or less ignored
when not involving men; in addition, the special prohibition against male homosexual behavior is
consistent with the Catholic emphasis on the wasting of the male seed as a sin. In medieval European
history there are abundant records of death penalties imposed upon males for sexual contact with other
males, but very few recorded cases of similar action against females.

In modern English and other European law, the statutes have continued to apply only to men
(there are specific statutes against female homosexuality only in Austria, Greece, Finland and
Switzerland); but in American law, the phrasing of most of the statutes would make them applicable to
both female and male homosexual activity: The prohibitions usually refer to “all persons,” “any persons,”
or “any human being,” without distinction as to sex. The enforcement of these laws is, however, quite
another matter; a study of U.S. court records reveals that almost no women have ever been prosecuted
or convicted for homosexuality, while the prosecution and conviction of men for homosexual activity has
been extensive.

Only one state (Michigan) specifically prohibits lesbian activity. In five states (Connecticut,
Georgia, Kentucky, South Carolina and Wisconsin) the sodomy statutes are so written as to not include
female homosexuality. The Georgia statute, titled Sodomy and Bestiality, defines sodomy as “the carnal
knowledge and connection against the order of nature, by man with man, or in the same unnatural
manner with woman.” The law reads, in part: “Crime of sodomy as defined in this section cannot be
accomplished between two women; hence person convicted on indictment charging her with sodomy,
both participants in act being alleged to be females, will be discharged on habeas corpus on ground that
she is being legally restrained of her liberty, in that indictment on which she was convicted was null and
void.”

This statute thus offers an interesting example of the irrational nature of laws dealing with
sodomy: Cunnilingus (oral contact with the female genitalia) is not a crime in Georgia if performed by
another female, but it is a crime if it is performed by a male; heterosexual fellatio (oral contact with the
male genitalia) is similarly prohibited. The statute states, in a further paragraph concerned with oralgenital
activity: “Where man and woman voluntarily have carnal knowledge and connection against the
order of nature with each other, they are both guilty of sodomy, whether offense be committed by the
mouth of the man or by the mouth of the woman.” The law makes no exception for the husband and wife.

The courts have held that heterosexual cunnilingus is not “the crime against nature” in Mississippi
and Ohio, and the decisions would presumably apply to homosexual cunnilingus as well; in Arkansas,
Colorado, Iowa and Nebraska the vagueness of the statutes also leaves some doubt as to the status of
female homosexuality. Neither male nor female homosexuality is illegal in Illinois, for it is one state in all
the 50 that has no sodomy statute.

Animal Contacts

U.S. sodomy statutes universally prohibit sexual contact between humans and infrahuman
species of animal life; the “abominable and detestable crime against nature” is most often defined in the
statutes as being “either with mankind or beast.” Kinsey reports that animal contacts represent the
smallest source of common sexual outlet, but they are by no means rare and the relatively higher
percentages of such experience in rural communities, on farms, and where larger animals are more
readily available, suggest that accessibility may have more to do with the incidence of such behavior than
moral and legal prohibitions.

Kinsey states, “To many persons it will seem almost axiomatic that two mating animals should be
individuals of the same species. This is so often true, from one end of the animal kingdom to the other,
that exceptions to the rule seem especially worthy of note. To those who believe, as children do, than
conformance should be universal, any departure from the rule becomes an immorality. The immorality
seems particularly gross to an individual who is unaware of the frequency with which exceptions to the
supposed rule actually occur….

"Even the scientists have been considerably biased in their investigations in the field, for they too
have accepted the traditions. Even they have believed that matings between individuals of different
species occur only rarely. Within the last few decades, however, students of taxonomy, genetics, and
evolution have had the existence of interspecific hybrids increasingly drawn to their attention. These, of
course, predicate the existence of interpecific matings. Some biologists are clearly uncomfortable in the
face of this data, and are inclined to argue them away as they would argue away blots on their philosophy
or theology. Even among the higher animals, interpecific crosses, or crosses between distinct varieties,
have increasingly become known. The birdbanding work has shown that birds respect the limits of their
own species much less often than the old-time naturalists would have insisted. And, finally, the students
of sexual behavior among the higher mammals are beginning to report an increasing number of instances
of animals mating, or trying to mate, with individuals of totally distinct and sometimes quite remote
species.

"When one examines the observed cases of such crosses, and especially the rather considerable
number of instances in which primates, including man, have been involved, one begins to suspect that
the rules about interspecific matings are not so universal as tradition would have it. Indeed, one is struck
anew with the necessity for better reasons than biologists and psychologists have yet found, for expecting
that animal matings should invariably be limited to individuals of the same species.

"In light of the above, it is particularly interesting to note the degree of abhorrence with which
intercourse between the human and the animals of other species is viewed by most persons who have
not had such experience. The biologist and the psychologist, and the anthropologist and the student of
history, will have made a significant contribution when they can expound the development of our taboos
on such contacts.”

These taboos were already well-established in time of the Old Testament and the Talmud. It is
worth noting that in the older Hittite code, which influenced later Hebrew law, the taboos on animal
intercourse were not so clearly the moral issues that they subsequently came to be. Specifically, in the
Hittite code it is decreed that “If a man lie with a cow the punishment is death…. If a man lies with a hog or
dog, he shall die…. If a bull rear upon a man, the bull shall die, but the man shall not die…. If a boar rear
upon a man, there is no penalty…. If a man lies with a horse or mule, there is no penalty, but he shall not
come near the king, and he shall not become a priest.”

Kinsey comments, “These are proscriptions against contacts with certain animals, while contacts
with certain animals are more or less accepted. Such distinctions are strikingly paralleled by the taboos
which make certain foods clean and other foods unclean. [As we have previously noted, early Christians
then adapted and substantially reinforced these traditions; and it became, for a time, an act of bestiality
for a Christian to have sexual relations with a Jew.] The student of human folkways is inclined to see a
considerable body of superstition in the origins of all such taboos, even though they may ultimately
become religious and moral issues for whole nations and whole races of people.”

In any case, it is certain that human contacts with animals of other species have been known
since the dawn of history: They appear in the folk tales of every ancient culture, and references to such
contacts abound in the writings and art of the oldest civilizations; they are also known to every race and
culture today, including our own.

Kinsey concludes, “Far from being a matter for surprise, the record simply substantiates our
present understanding that the forces which bring individuals of the same species together in sexual
relations, may sometimes serve to bring individuals of different species together in the same types of
sexual relations.”

About 8 percent of the total male population have some sexual contact with animals. Most such
experiences occur in early postadolescent years – between adolescence and the age of 20 – with the
incidence dropping markedly in the older age groups. Frequency of animal contacts is similarly low in the
male population, taken as a whole; for most individuals, they do not occur more than once or twice, or a
few times in a lifetime.

The significance of such experiences becomes more pronounced, however, when our
consideration is limited to the records of males raised in rural or farm communities, with a ready access to
animals. For this group, approximately 17 percent experience orgasm as a result of animal contacts
which occur sometime after the onset of adolescence; as many more rural males have sexual contacts
with animals that do not result in orgasm; and there are an additional number who have preadolescent
experiences, which are not included in the above calculations. In total, Kinsey reports, “Something
between 40 and 50 percent of all farm boys have some sort of animal contact, either with or without
orgasm, in their preadolescent, adolescent, and/or later histories. These must be minimum data, for there
has undoubtedly been some cover-up in the reports of these activities.”

Kinsey found that certain western areas of the United States, where animals are readily available
and social restraints related to such behavior are less severe, incidence figures for some communities
rose as high as 65 percent. The marked difference in percentages of experience between rural and urban
males, plus the number of experiences for urban boys that occur during visits to farms, suggests that the
opportunity for such contacts is a major consideration in determining the accumulative incidence; if citybred
boys had similar opportunity, Kinsey and his associates believe that the percentages of experience
for the total male population would approximate those established for rural males.

As with most other aspects of human sexual behavior, there is a high correlation between
educational level and the extent of infrahuman sexual experience: 14 to 16 percent of the rural males of
grade-school level, 20 percent of the rural males of high-school level, and 26 to 28 percent of the rural
males of college level have some contact with animals to the point of orgasm. Well over half of these
upper-level males have some sort of sexual contact with animals and nearly one in every three achieves
orgasm through such contacts.

Experiences with animals usually represent a form of sexual experimentation for the adolescent
male, which disappears in the mid-teens; but in some rural areas, especially in the West, there is a
considerable amount of regular activity in the later teens and even through the early twenties. In most
cases, such contacts are a substitute for heterosexual relations with human females; this is particularly
true in rural areas where the opportunity for both social and sexual relations with girls may be limited. In
most parts of the country animal intercourse is extremely rare among married males.

The animals involved in such contacts include practically all of the species that are commonly
domesticated in the farm or kept as pets in the household. Because of the relatively low incidence and
frequency of such activity in the population as a whole, animal contacts were significant primarily because
of the extreme social and legal taboos attached to such behavior.

Kinsey comments, “In rural communities where animal contacts are not infrequent, and where
there is some general knowledge that they do commonly occur, there seem to be few personal conflicts
growing out of such activity, and very few social difficulties. It is only when the farm-bred male migrates to
a city community and comes in contact city-bred reactions to these activities, that he becomes upset over
the contemplation of what he has done….

"Anglo-American legal codes rate sexual relations between the human and animals of other
species as sodomy, punishable under the same laws which penalize homosexual and mouth-genital
contacts. The city-bred judge who hears such a case is likely to be unusually severe in his condemnation,
and is likely to give the maximum sentence that is possible. Males that are sent to penal institutions on
such charges are likely to receive unusually severe treatment both from the administrations and from the
inmates of the institutions. All in all, there is probably no type of human sexual behavior which has been
so severely condemned by that segment of the population which happens not to have had such
experience, and which accepts the age-old judgment that animal intercourse must evidence a mental
abnormality, as well as an immorality.”

Sexual contacts with animals are even less common among females and Kinsey found only 3.6
percent of the adult female population with any evidence of such activity in their histories after the
beginning of adolescence. The sample was considered too small to permit any valid urban-rural or
educational breakdown, although a majority of the females who reported having had such experiences
were from the better-educated segments of the population.

The extensive sexual involvement of human females with a wide variety of animals in ancient
folklore, Classic Greek and Roman mythology, and major literary and artistic efforts of more recent
centuries (including some of world’s great art; e.g. Leda and the Swan has been a recurring, ever-popular
theme with artists down through the ages, from Classic sculpture, to the paintings by Michelangelo and
Rubens, to contemporary Picasso) is understood in its relation to actual sexual behavior when viewed not
as a reflection of common female activity, but as a projection of erotic male fantasies about the female.
The human male’s greater capacity to be aroused by psychosexual stimuli not only leads him into a far
greater number of sexual experiences, and experiences of greater variety, but also produces an
extensive masculine interest in unusual, rare, and sometimes fantastically impossible types of sexual
activity. In consequence, as Kinsey points out, there is a great deal more discussion and a more
extensive body of literature and art on such sexual themes as incest, transvestitism, necrophilia, and the
more extreme forms of fetishism, sadomasochism and animal contacts, than the actual occurrence of any
of these phenomena justifies.

It is clear, nevertheless, that there is a considerable diversity in human sexual behavior; that there
is considerable diversity in human sexual behavior; it is also clear that most of this variety on our favorite
theme is forbidden by the sterner traditions of our Judaeo-Christian heritage and by the statutory laws
that it has begotten.

Kinsey points out that for most individuals the various types of sexual activity may seem to fall
into categories that are as far apart as right and wrong, licit and illicit, normal and abnormal, acceptable
and unacceptable in our society. To each of us, the significance of any particular activity depends largely
upon our own previous experience. Ultimately, certain activities may seem to be the only ones that have
value, that are right, that are proper, that are socially acceptable; and all departures from our own
particular pattern may appear the extremes in what is abnormal and immoral. But scientific data now
available support the conclusion that, under the proper set of environmental circumstances, most
individuals could have been sexually conditioned in any of a number of different directions, even into
activities which they now consider unacceptable.

In the search for a more reasonable objective and psychologically sound approach to sex, upon
to which to base better social and legal codes, it would if we more clearly recognized and differentiated
between the sexual behavior that is common to a large part of society and that which is relatively
uncommon. Kinsey observes, “Considerable confusion has been introduced into our thinking by this
failure to distinguish between sexual activities that are frequent and a fundamental part of the pattern of
behavior, and sexual activities which are rare and of significance only to a limited number of persons.
Psychologic and psychiatric texts are as likely to give as much space to overt sadomasochistic or
necrophiliac activity as they give to homosexual and mouth-genital activities, but the last two are
widespread and significant parts of the lives of many females and males, while many of the other types of
behavior are in actuality rare.”

Illegal Petting

Current U.S. laws give governmental sanction to a specific set of religious ideals regarding sex.
Our present quarrel is not with the ideals themselves – though we do believe that a rational society
should be able to produce a better, more humane, more workable sexual morality than the present one,
and we intend a fuller discussion of that aspect of the problem in a later installment; but we here object to
– and it is a concern that should be shared by every individual who believes in the fundamental principles
of our democracy, regardless of his personal religious and moral persuasion – is the unconstitutional
church-state alliance that makes any one religious dogma the law of the land in this supposedly free
society.

All sexual intercourse outside the church-state-sanctioned bonds of matrimony is prohibited under
the statutes on fornication and adultery; all nonprocreative sexual activity, between the same and
opposite sexes, both inside and outside the marriage, including any undue familiarity with household pets,
is prohibited under the statutes on sodomy.

Our state laws on sodomy are derived directly from the religious doctrine that the only natural
purpose of sex is procreation; it follows, therefore, that nonprocreative sex is a “crime against nature.”
These sodomy statutes are so all-decisive in their joyless suppression of any variety in our sexual
behavior that we might be prompted to conclude that the only form of love play left legal is petting. Such a
conclusion would be overly optimistic. In two states (Indiana and Wyoming) the sodomy statutes actually
include a prohibition against heavy petting (the masturbation of another person of either sex who is under
the age of 21). The laws in both states read: “Whoever entices, allures, instigates or aids any person
under the age of twenty-one (21) years to commit masturbation or self-pollution shall be deemed guilty of
sodomy.” This means, quite literally, that if a Wyoming or Indian male masturbates his 20-year-old
girlfriend, he is guilty of sodomy.

The medieval Church taboos on even solitary masturbation continue to influence contemporary
society’s attitude to a sexual activity that is near universal in the male and common to a majority of
females as well. Ultimately 92 percent of the total male population is involved in masturbation which leads
to orgasm; and among college-educated males, the incidence is higher, reaching 96 percent. In the total
female population, 62 percent ultimately engage in masturbation, and 58 percent achieve orgasm in this
manner; educational level predictably exists as a factor, with only 34 percent of the grade-school-level
females ever achieving orgasm through masturbation, 57 to 59 percent of the high-school and college
level, and 63 percent of the graduate-level females masturbating to the point of orgasm.

Heavy petting, frequently including masturbation of either, or both, sexes is extremely common in
the years prior to marriage; indeed, for upper-educated males and females, such premarital sex play
often serves as a substitute for coitus. Almost all males engage in fairly extensive heavy petting prior to
marriage and 88 percent have some petting experience that leads to orgasm; 96 percent of all females
have some premarital petting experience and 39 percent have achieved orgasm through such petting.
The extent of direct manual stimulation of the genitalia of, or by, a partner, as a petting technique, is
related to the amount of previous coital experience. Among females who have not had sexual intercourse,
36 percent have the same petting in which they receive such manual stimulation, and 24 percent give
such manual stimulation to the male; among females who have only had a limited amount of coitus, 87
percent have relationships in which they receive, and 72 percent where they give, manual stimulation;
among females with more extensive coital experience, 95 percent receive, and 86 percent give, manualgenital
stimulation.

It is reasonable to assume that the male and female populations of Wyoming and Indiana are little
different in such behavior than the total population of the U.S.; that being so, this unique wrinkle in the
sodomy statutes of these two states attempts to suppress some of the most common sex activity in
existence – activity in which almost all of the citizens have, at one time or another, been involved.

The severity of the penalties against sodomy, or “crimes against nature,” is dramatized by the
Wyoming and Indiana statutes. These two states could punish the completed act of sexual intercourse
between a man and a girl who happened to be between the ages of 18 and 21 as fornication, with
maximum possible sentences of three and six months respectively. (If a girl were under the age of 18, the
act would be considered statutory rape and permit a considerably heavier penalty.) But if the same male
and female refrained from sexual intercourse, confining their lovemaking to petting – including
masturbation of the female – they would be guilty of an act of sodomy and liable to imprisonment of up to
ten years in Wyoming and 14 years in Indiana.

Penalties for Sodomy

The irrational nature of U.S. sodomy statutes emphasizes the lack of logic that pervades almost
all of our sex laws; the severity of the penalties for what our lawmakers have deemed to be “crimes
against nature” emphasizes the extreme, religiously inspired superstition and emotionalism that still
persist in our attitudes toward sex in this supposed modern, rational, scientifically enlightened, just,
humane and free society.

Forty-nine of the 50 states have sodomy statutes. Almost all of them make illegal the variety of
noncoital sex activity discussed in this issue – at least some of which is engaged in, at one time or
another, by the majority of our adult population. Almost none of these statutes make any distinction
between a prohibited act when it is performed by members of the same or opposite sex (the single
exception permits certain activity between two females, as noted, that is prohibited between a female and
a male). None of these statutes makes any distinction between a prohibited act when it is performed by a
married couple and one that is unmarried. The penalties for behavior covered under our sodomy statutes
are among the most severe of any in U.S. law.

Sixteen states and the District of Columbia specify imprisonment of up to ten years at hard labor
for “crimes against nature”; the maximum sentence in another six is 14 or 15 years and 11 states specify
20. In Idaho and Montana the minimum penalty for sodomy is five years, with no maximum indicated; in
North Carolina the minimum is five years and the maximum 60; in Nevada the possible maximum penalty
is imprisonment for life.

The American Law Institute expressed its concern over U.S. sex statutes in 1955 when it drafted
its Model Penal Code to replace our present irrational laws. This model code was predicted on the
premise that in a free society all sex relations entered into freely by adults in private should be excluded
from our criminal law. In the nine years since the Law Institute handed down this opinion, the legislature
of only one state – Illinois – has made any serious attempt to correct its statutes on sex. Some two years
ago Illinois' legislators replaced their sodomy statute with a new law patterned after the one suggested by
the Institute. Illinois is, therefore, the only state in the Union with no statute for “the abominable and
detestable crimes against nature.”

This example of modern legislative acumen is not without its irony, however. The Illinois
lawmakers did remove the state’s sodomy statute, but they left standing the statutes against fornication
and adultery. Illinois is thus in the unique position of permitting all so-called “perversion,” both
heterosexual and homosexual, while prohibiting normal sexual intercourse.

It is obvious that we are still a very long way from establishing sane sex laws anywhere in these
United States.